Competency-based Training Needs Assessment for Research Managers and Administrators in Africa and the United Kingdom to Strengthen Equitable Partnerships

Background: The need for competent research managers and administrators (RMAs) has increased due to the complexity in managing research projects between disparate and international partners. To facilitate the creation of robust training and professional development programmes it is essential to first understand the status quo. A collaborative project, Sustainable Management and Administration for Research: Training across the project Lifecycle (SMARTLife), made up of RMAs from South Africa, Zimbabwe and the United Kingdom (UK) developed a set of competencies to conduct an RMA competency-based training needs assessment scoping tool. Method: Nine areas were identified: Equitable partnership; Finance Management; Project Management; Monitoring and Evaluation; Reporting and Communications; Equity, Diversity & Inclusion; Training and Capacity Development; Impact a& Sustainability; and Ethical, Social, Legal a& Social Implications. Tasks for each competency area were identified to develop an scoping tool that had 168 data collection points. The tool was advertised through press releases, mailing lists and social media. Results: 108 responses were obtained: with 49% from 15 Africa countries/the remainder from the UK. The UK (71%) had more permanent RMA staff members compared to Africa (39%). There were more respondents in Africa with the title of Research Manager/Coordinator(p=0.0132) compared to the UK where most of the RMAs were employed as Finance/Contract officers. 60% of respondents from the UK had more than three years experience while only 35% from Africa had experience. While most RMAs had formal higher education qualifications, their training was not in research management and administration, which requires a diverse range of skills. Confidence in specific tasks varied between the UK and Africa whereas collaborative partnerships challenges and enablers were similar. Conclusion This work highlights differences in RMA training and experience RMA between Africa and UK, this work could inform much needed competency-based training for RMAs and partnership strategies that aid mutual-learning.


Introduction
Research managers and administrators (RMAs) support research projects throughout the project lifecycle. They are key to effective research governance often taking up the bulk of the administrative burden away from academics and researchers (Langley & Green, 2009;Tauginienė, 2009). Increased need for tighter funder reporting requirements, complex institutional procedures and policies especially in large-scale collaborative research projects have created a need for dedicated and trained RMAs. The roles and tasks of RMAs vary greatly from providing support to specific projects, to faculty and even institutional level support, across the entire project cycle or at specific points (Langley & Green, 2009;Tauginienė, 2009). In addition, the roles and responsibilities of RMAS are continually evolving to match the ever-changing research cultures and infrastructures. For example, traditionally, research was conducted in small teams but the research culture is fast changing with the growing needs of multi-national collaborations. However, unlike developed regions such as the United States of America (USA) and the United Kingdom (UK) many research institutions in Africa are yet to establish dedicated RMA officers and processes (Akindele & Kerridge, 2019). Research capacity development activities, irrespective of region, have largely disregarded the upskilling of RMAS and focused mainly on academics or specific research support technical professionals such as laboratory technicians and data managers (Bennett et al., 2013;Karikari et al., 2015).
The general global-wide disregard of the need to strengthen RMAs skills and competencies is highlighted by the limited trainings provided by academic institutes (Table 1). As highlighted in Table 1, existing training programmes are mainly available in the north and therefore are likely to lack content that addresses need from the global south. Some of the programmes which do address skills needs from developing countries are subject-specific, such as Global Health and may also be limited in applicability to RMAs in academic or research institutes if they focus on case studies from not-for-profit organizations (University of Washington, 2009).
Most existing training and professional development opportunities (Table 1) we identified are available through RMAs professional associations such as the Association of Research Managers and Administrators (ARMA), UK and the European Association of Research Managers and Administrators (EARMA), but are mostly limited to their respective members and also very costly (ARMA, 2021;EARMA, 2021). Training available to non-members might also have conditions which for example do not allow RMAs without experience to participate ("EARMA Certificate in Research Management >> WBC-RTI. INFO -Western Balkan Countries Research Technology Innovation," 2018). In Africa, the Southern Africa Research and Innovation Management Association (SARIMA) also offers short online courses on research management and while it is open to non-members, it is also relatively expensive. The West African Research and Innovation Management Association (WARIMA) regularly organises training workshops for its members while trinity facilitate training of RMAs. These different training activities could partner with academic institutes which to make the courses more affordable and accessible to persons in academia who are involved, or an interested in a career in research management and administration.
A number of training needs assessments in RMA field have been conducted, (Langley & Green, 2009;Tauginienė, 2009;Virágh et al., 2019). However, these assessments have some limitations. Of note is a needs assessment conducted as a business case for the ERAMUS project through a mixed-method approach (Langley & Barsby, 2020). While this needs assessment captured valuable implementation information, it is biased towards the Southern African due to funding stipulations. Given, the trend towards internationalization of research, such a needs assessment missed an opportunity to critically assess differences in responses between different geographical regions as such differences have potential to highlight issues that could negatively impact equitable international research partnerships. The creation of any professional training for RMAs needs to be broad enough to cater for a vast range of competencies required while catering for diverse and sometimes disparate partnerships.
Competence-based needs assessments are widely used across different areas to inform design of training programmes (Frank et al., 2010;Kim & Roh, 2019;Mulder et al., 2018;Nembaware et al., 2019). Such needs assessments commonly use a set of competencies to capture existing roles as well as assess the current training needs and gaps. To identify training needs to RMAs in the UK and Africa, we established The Sustainable Management and Administration for Research: Training across the project Lifecycle (SMARTLife), a collaborative project between RMAs from Southern Africa and the UK, we developed, a) a set of competences for RMAs and b) used these competencies to conduct an RMAs skills and training needs assessment for international collaborations through a comparative assessment of participants from both the UK and Africa.

Method
The competence areas were compiled from the ARMA webpage and adjustments were made by SMARTLife members to make these more relevant to their current experiences through group discussions. The SMARTLife team developed a scoping tool which had three main sections (SMARTLife, 2021b): 1. Demographic questions name, age range, location, gender, highest level of education, current role, type of employer, years of experience, training received for RMA role, tasks participant perform in their current roles.
2. Levels of confidence in specific competence areas: Current responsibilities and how confident participants feel undertaking certain tasks relating to international research partnerships; the main challenges associated with international partnerships; approaches that have worked well and the available resources.
3. Aspects related to future collaborations with SMARTLife: How survey participants may like to engage with future training activities, to promote knowledge exchange amongst. The scoping tool was developed in the REDCap system. Piloting and adjustments of the tool were conducted by the SMARTLife team members and with a few selected external RMAs participants. The three sections were further broken down into 9 competencies areas as listed below: a) Equitable partnerships: Sustainable research collaborations depend on, among other things, fair research partnerships, co-ownership, capacity development, and their impact on improving social and academic outcomes. As part of the project, the team evaluated several tasks that gauge equitable partnerships and these included looking at how trust within partnerships is built, facilitated, as well as sustained. In this section, the project investigated how partnering teams (i) navigate funding obligations taking into account differing local contexts, (ii) contribute to a fair working environment taking into account of cultural differences, (iii) promote or support mutual learning, (iv) evaluations that take into account differing needs of target audiences (e.g. project beneficiaries, funders etc) in order to improve collaborations. b) Financial Management: Financial management is fundamental to securing funding, managing projects, balancing budgets, handling operations, ensuring compliance and providing support in many other capacities. Major areas of consideration in financial management which informed the questions posed to participants include the development of budgets; ensuring adherence to funders terms and conditions and procuring what is needed for the project; maintaining the staff working on the project. c) Project management: Critical tasks that informed questions asked in this area include preparation of bids between international partners; establishing project plans or policies; creating project management platforms; coordination and communication; achieving project deliverables; building or maintaining relationships with funders, partners or other stakeholders; collecting and collating data and project reporting to funders and other key stakeholders.

d) Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E):
Questions on M&E in the scoping survey touched on designing of M&E frameworks and indicators; conducting due diligence of partners or sub-awardees; collecting monitoring data; conducting data analyses; and writing evaluation reports. e) Reporting and Communications: Communication covers aspects within teams, between teams, and across to funders and the general public. Important tasks in this section included: designing and implementing communication plans; engaging with the media; developing funder reports and all engagements with key stakeholders.
f) Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion: Diversity can be an asset in collaborative teams or partnerships however, it mostly works when this diversity is tapped into, with equality in mind, thus enriching a project through merging of different perspectives. Important tasks in this section include how to design equality, diversity and inclusion plans for a project, ensuring that equality, diversity and inclusion plans are implemented; training stakeholders about equality, diversity and inclusion.
g) Training and Capacity Development: The tasks in this specific area include supporting applicants in developing impactful research proposals, supporting the development and strengthening of partnerships to ensure research impact is realised at a local level; monitor ongoing impact and how it relates to the overall project goals; supporting further development of impacts whether that be through additional funding, dissemination, or reporting.
h) Impact and Sustainability: Tasks include ensuring training and capacity development activities are clearly defined throughout the application; support and maintaining collaborative partnerships to encourage training; support training activities and capacity building activities; support knowledge exchange activities and dissemination at the end of a project.
i) Ethical, Legal and Social Implications: RMAs often have to ensure thorough ethics reviews prior to application submissions or projects starting; ensuring contracts are in place detailing all obligations; assisting researchers to demonstrate an awareness of the social and ethical implications of their research and supporting the collection and storage of data and feeding back findings to research participants.
The scoping tool was piloted and then fine-tuned before it was implemented. The average completion time of the scooping to was 15 minutes. The target population for the scoping exercise were RMAs in Africa and in the UK and the scoping tool was distributed broadly via a press-release provided in both French and English. The scoping tool was also disseminated via various mailing lists of the participating universities, research consortia, RMA societies such as ARMA. Descriptive and inferential analyses of the results of the scoping exercise were conducted in STATA. Thematic analyses were conducted on free text responses. Ethical approval was obtained from the Human Research Ethics Committee of the Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Cape Town (R023/2015). All participants provided written consent.

Characteristics of participants
A total of 108 participants completed the scoping tool with 49% from Africa countries (n=49) and the rest from the UK (n=59). Respondents from Africa came from 15 countries (Algeria 1, Cameroon 1, Cote d' Ivoire 1, Ghana 2, Kenya 1, Malawi 1, Mali 1, Nigeria 4, Somalia 1, South Africa 23, Uganda 1, Sudan 1, Tanzania 2, Zambia 1, Zimbabwe 8). There was a significant difference in the gender distribution of the participants from the UK and African countries, with African countries having twice as many males as the UK. The 55-64 age was more common in African participants (12%) against 2% (p=0.055) in the UK.
A statistically significant number of participants were employed in the academic sector (P-value 0.001) in comparison to those employed by government, private and research institutes (see Table 2). The UK (71%) had statistically significantly more permanent staff members among participants compared to Africa (39%), thus, African participants were more contract-based. Dean 60% of responds in the UK had more than three years of experience in the RMA field while only 35% of participants from Africa had more than 3 years (Table 3).

Highest qualification versus training for the current job.
The formal qualifications: PhD, MSc and Undergraduate, were the highest attained in this order. As illustrated in Table 2, there was no statistically significant difference in the distribution of highest qualification between African and UK participants. Most of the RMAs received training for their current post from informal peer training followed by self-teaching and certified short courses. Of note is that there is an inverse relationship between the highest qualification attained versus training for the current job ( Figure 1).

Roles versus job description.
Most of the respondents irrespective of their location had an operational, management and leadership roles. In addition, all the participants irrespective of their job description worked across all the identified competency areas. There was not significant difference between the UK versus Africa. Irrespective of participants' job categories' they reported conducting tasks in all the competency areas identified in the Method section, see Table 3 for details.

Confidence
The participant's confidence levels in performing several tasks differed between the UK and African participants as illustrated in the heatmap shown in Table 4. We considered confidence levels of the groups to be high-level if more than 70% of the participants selected "strongly confident and confident". The high-level confidence areas are highlighted in green. Table 4b shows a Heatmap of confidence levels against competency areas (rounded to the nearest 10). Highlighted are areas where there are more >20% differences in responses between African and European participants. There were differences between African and the UK participants (Africa versus UK, respectively), with respect to confidence in promoting or supporting mutual learning (90% versus 40%), lack of confidence in procurement (20 and 50%), confidence in project management platforms (60% versus 40%), coordination and communication (90% versus 60%), Designing of M&E frameworks and indicators (60% versus 30%) , conducting data analyses (70% versus 40%) and engaging with media (50% versus 20%), respectively. These results could be a reflection of the differences in the composition of the participants from the UK versus Africa.

Challenges versus enablers for previous successful relationships
All the challenges that were provided in the scoping tool were selected by the participants. Only a few qualitative challenges were reported. Issues covered cross-cultural and cross-sector understanding ("differences in definitions across cultures/sectors"), adequate planning ("Insufficient time spent on preparation.") and poor external and internal systems ("Financial oversight has not been streamlined"). Participants were asked to provide free text responses on what made previous collaborations a success, a thematic analysis was conducted, and several themes emerged. Effective communication followed by effective  planning and project management emerged as key facilitators for successful collaborations as shown in Figure 2. The challenges seem to map onto the "what has worked well" questions, i.e. the "what has worked well responses" cited approaches that would overcome most of the challenges listed by participants (see Table 5a and Table 5b).

Resources
Participants were asked to highlight resources or skills they are willing to share with others in the future. A number or participants indicated their willingness to share skills and knowledge.
The SMARTlife team also compiled a list of resources which could be of benefit to RMAs new to the field. These resources have been categorized according to the competence areas identified in this work and are freely accessible online from

Discussion
Currently, the RMA profession is generally ill-defined, poorly understood and therefore is barely recognized in some developing countries. A number of publications confirm the need for RMA professionals for the preparation and implementation of effective research projects (Langley & Green, 2009;Tauginienė, 2009;Virágh et al., 2019). The growing trend towards increased collaborative multi-institute and international research projects further emphasize the need to recognize, strengthen and professionalize the RMA field. Documenting baselines and needs of target populations is a recommended approach for strengthening implementation plans. This report is one of a handful of scoping exercises conducted in the RMA field and provides insights into the current status quo of RMAs' training and roles in the UK and Africa and has potential to be useful in informing collaborative projects and training programmes for RMAs.
The need for formal training programmes is highlighted by results from this scoping exercise and this is not a new finding (Langley & Green, 2009;Tauginienė, 2009). Most of the participants are self-taught and their formal qualification is not aligned to their current job role. While professional organizations such as ARMA offer training opportunities for their members, membership are quite steep. There is need to augment the ongoing association-based training opportunities with formal university-based qualifications. Unfortunately, most of the training available for RMAs are available and were developed in developed countries such as the United States of America and the UK and might not cater effectively for the needs of RMAs in different regions. A note-worthy achievement for Africa was the establishment of MSc programme which was recently established at the University of Stellenbosch (Langley & Barsby, 2020). However, there is need to provide short term certification such as post graduate short courses and diplomas which might be fit for purpose taking into account the fact that most current RMAs already have PhDs and MSCs.
There is a challenge to provide courses in lower-resourced research environments which are affordable to the RMA community. Ongoing work within institutions and the sector to raise the profile of RMAs and acknowledge the contribution they make towards a successful research ecosystem is one way to advocate for increased resources for formalised RMA training.
If not fully understood, differences in the profiles and experiences of professionals in a collaborative project may limit the success of any research project. Lower job security in African participants versus the UK counterparts could lead to less continuity and ineffective partnerships if the risk of personnel changes is not mitigated upfront during the project planning. While some of the differences are risks and required mitigation, some differences in participants' profiles could be leveraged for capacity strengthening and mutual learning. For example, the increased years of experience highlighted by the UK counterparts could be leveraged to strengthen specific skills in the lesser experienced collaborators.
Skills and competency-based assessments have potential to inform training and project partnerships and such assessments have been used in a range of fields including bioinformatics, genomics and other management professionals. An added advantage is that a set of competency areas and specific tasks can also be used in longitudinal assessments to inform adjustments and optimisation of research partnerships as well as for the development and adjustments of training programmes. While this study highlights differences between the African and UK participants in confidence levels of specific areas, we acknowledge while these differences could be reflecting reality, these differences could also simply be a reflection of the differences in the job roles of the participants who took part in this scoping review and this require further exploration.

Conclusions
A qualitative study is recommended to probe further some of the results observed from this work. A more thorough literature review is recommended in the future, for example to compile a more exhaustive list of existing competence areas. After the scoping exercise had been concluded, we discovered we had omitted the supporting and sourcing of institutional and project infrastructure as a key competence area. The roles of RMAs in supporting project infrastructure has been highlighted in the eighteen parameter Higher Education Institutional Capacity Assessment Tool (HEICAT) which was developed by the International Research Exchanges Board (IREX) to gauge performance of academic institutes (HEICAT, 2019).
This work has potential to inform the development of more formal competence-based courses or programs to teach RMA as a profession. The cost of the courses needs to be affordable to RMAs. We also recommend stability in the contracts for RMA posts in-order to retain expertise. The RMAs highlighted the broadness of their roles, therefore streamlining of duties for RMAs could improve their efficiencies. In addition to informing training and the working conditions for RMAs, results from this work highlight differences between RMAs that may be useful for informing and promoting equitable international collaborations. © 2022 Jones C. This is an open access peer review report distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Carolynn Thomas Jones
Center for Clinical and Translational Science, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA This is an excellent article that highlights the needs for Research Managers and Administrators for grants and contracts training. The differences between UK and Africa participants are somewhat predictable due to the differences in roles; however there is an increasing need, even amongst academic institutions in the US for improved training for research administration training. There is a professional association the writers may benefit from reviewing -srainternational.org that could be another source for training activities, some are free, others may have costs ($99US).
In addition to the Joint Task Force for Clinical Trial Competencies (https://mrctcenter.org/clinicaltrial-competency/) there is definitely a need for better project management and research administration training. The SMARTLIfe Competencies would be a wonderful addition to clinical research education.

If applicable, is the statistical analysis and its interpretation appropriate? Yes
Are all the source data underlying the results available to ensure full reproducibility? Yes

Are the conclusions drawn adequately supported by the results?
Yes